Depression, suicidal thoughts/feelings and the other side..

Hello! I haven’t written in months. 1. Because I didn’t feel like it. 2. Because this wasn’t going to save me. 3. Because there is still this stigma and judgement around feeling suicidal.

Only a handful of people know how I was feeling and still, I felt a sense of shame and guilt. I didn’t want anyone to know but sometimes a problem just becomes too big to deal with on your own. I ended up sending a friend of mine a silly (so I thought at the time) message that was essentially a cry for help. She rushed round from work and just comforted me while I cried and then helped me form a plan of action. She rang my GP surgery for me (trying to make an appointment for that day, but you know how Doctors are) to discuss my mental health and hopefully change my antidepressants as they obviously weren’t working. I did get an appointment for the week after. And my friend was staying around that evening anyway.

Fast forward to my doctors appointment and we discussed changing my antidepressants to ones which can have a bad side effect of feeling suicidal. (this was not mine and my gps greatest idea) but they had also proven to be greatly effective. I had to lower my dose gradually of my current antidepressants and then stop completely for 4 days and then start the new ones. In the meantime, my mental health was hanging on by a thread, but I just kept telling myself to hang in there because I would soon hopefully start to feel better. After about 3-4 weeks of taking them, I was crying every morning and just staying in bed most of the time. I would just wake up every day and feel a massive feeling of dread that I had to live as I did the day before. I also felt a feeling of disappointment to still be alive. I felt like a massive burden to my family and friends. I felt like my life had no purpose and like there was literally no point in me being live anymore. I’ve read a lot on feeling suicidal over the years from books, social media, peoples individual experiences etc and I knew it wasn’t going to feel like this forever but it definitely did feel like a black cloud was hanging over my head.

After about five weeks, I decided I couldn’t do it anymore, if I carried on taking the antidepressants, I would have killed myself. So my mum made a doctors telephone appointment for me to change them again. But at the same time, I immediately stopped taking the current ones. My mental health was awful, and at the lowest it had ever been. I still was having suicidal thoughts, but I just kept telling myself to make it through the day. I don’t really know what kept me from acting on it but somehow I didn’t do it. Between my phone call doctors appointment, I applied for a form of counselling that you do online as I still hadn’t heard back from the NHS one. The online counselling sessions were actually working with the NHS as well. So I started them and had one session with my therapist, Andrea, before my appointment with my gp. My telephone appointment happened and the doctor recommended a different antidepressant, which is the one that I’m still on. It works for me amazingly well. That along with Andrea, made me feel so much better within a couple of weeks. I had six sessions with Andrea altogether. She just listened to everything I had to say, gave me a lot of mindfulness tips, YouTubers channels to watch and even recommended me starting an online course in something I’m interested in. I started a course on mindfulness, believe it or not lol.

So now, after months of feeling absolutely dreadful, I feel so much better! But nothing in my life really physically changed. Just a different mindset completely changed the way I was feeling. I know that a lot of people aren’t so lucky. I heard of someone recently with my condition (Ataxia not Friedreich’s) went the assisted suicide route and travelled to Switzerland to end his life. He was older and I guess his progression just became too much for him. That’s a very personal choice, and I definitely do think that assisted suicide should be legal everywhere. I don’t want to write too much in detail about how I was feeling, but I’m sure some/most people with my condition can definitely understand where I was coming from. I have debated with myself over the last couple of weeks, whether writing this is a good idea or not. I’m sure there will be some people that think this is attention seeking or unnecessary to air. Think that if you want, but the point is that suicidal feelings are far too common and real not to talk about individual experiences. If you’re feeling suicidal/on the verge, please talk to someone. If you know someone who is having these thoughts, please talk to them, just let them know that you care and are there for them. Thank you for reading all of this word vomit!